About Jan Dibbets

An early adopter of color film, Jan Dibbets takes a philosophical approach to photography and landscape, working at the intersection of photography, conceptual art, minimalism, and land art. Dibbets seeks to unveil the ways in which photographs flatten pictorial space. He challenges normative models of photographic display, exhibiting his images in serialized grids and creating shaped photographs from multiple images spliced together. These displays suggest alternative possibilities for the construction of both the picture plane and the photograph. His work deals with the natural world, drawing on traditions of Dutch landscape painting, but with unusual depictions of nature, such as the unnatural merging of earth and ocean. Dibbets, who has exhibited in three iterations of the recurring Documenta exhibition in Kassel, Germany, garnered international acclaim after his presentation in the Dutch pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1972.